South Africa’s traffic fine change nightmare

The rollout of the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (Aarto), which will bring sweeping changes to traffic fines and penalties in South Africa, has dragged on for more than two decades.

Legal action, administrative challenges, and resistance from certain municipalities concerned about the impact on their fine revenues have hampered Aarto’s implementation.

The government has punted the contentious legislation as a means to improve the country’s road safety.

The first big difference it will make to how traffic fines function in South Africa is that it will separate violations between minor infringements and serious offences.

It also introduces a demerit point system similar to those used in countries like the United Kingdom.

If a motorist accumulates enough points within a 12-month period, their licence is temporarily suspended.

Continued violations could eventually lead to the full cancellation of a driver’s licence.

Aarto was originally passed into law in 1998 and has been used to deal with traffic infringements and offences in Johannesburg and Tshwane since 2008.

The only section of the law that has not taken effect in those metros is the points demerit system.

Everywhere else in South Africa, road traffic law violations are still dealt with in terms of the Criminal Procedure Act.

All these violations are regarded as criminal offences and are prosecuted by the National Prosecuting Authority, most often in the country’s Magistrate Courts.

Aarto decriminalises all but the most serious traffic law offences and converts them into infringements, which are dealt with administratively by default.

While that might sound like a more reasonable way to deal with minor violations, civil society organisations, including the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa), Fines SA, and the Automobile Association of South Africa, have raised serious concerns over this change.

They have argued that the real purpose of the law is to expedite the collection of traffic fine revenues and impose an ominous administrative burden on those accused of violating traffic laws.

“When the offence is dealt with administratively, the motorist concerned does not have the right to be presumed innocent,” Fines SA said.

“He or she is a participant, albeit an unwilling one, in an administrative process.”

Outa has created a flow chart illustrating that motorists’ options after receiving an infringement notice and the potential consequences of those actions are highly complex.

This shows that the new system could be an administrative nightmare for motorists who make themselves guilty of less serious violations.

Delay upon delay

The implementation of Aarto has faced setbacks for well over a decade.

Some time after the system began its pilot in Johannesburg and Tshwane, President Jacob Zuma proclaimed that Aarto would come into effect nationally in July 2010.

However, he withdrew that date after the Western Cape government took the matter to court over concerns about shortcomings in the legislation and its feasibility.

An Aarto Amendment Act was developed by the transport department to help alleviate concerns over the Aarto Act.

That was signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa in August 2019 and promulgated the following month.

However, Outa took the issue to court in July 2020, calling for the Act to be declared unconstitutional and unlawful.

The Minister of Transport at the time, Fikile Mbalula, and the Road Traffic Infringement Agency (RTIA), the entity charged with implementing Aarto, opposed the case.

While the matter was ongoing, Mbalula continued to announce plans to roll out Aarto.

In July 2021, he laid out a 4-phase plan to gradually roll out Aarto to more municipalities, with full implementation, including the demerit points system, by July 2022.

The phases were to be as follows:

• Phase 1: 1 July 2021 to 30 September 2021 — Establishing 7 service outlets, enabling the Natis system to collect Aarto payments, and launching communication and education awareness campaigns
• Phase 2: 1 October 2021 to 31 December 2021 — Rollout of Aarto to 67 municipalities, establishment of 18 more service outlets, and nationwide launch of adjudication process, with Appeals Tribunal in full operation
• Phase 3: 1 January 2022 to 30 June 2022 — Rollout of Aarto to remaining 144 municipalities
• Phase 4 : 1 July 2022 — Points Demerit System comes online and 20 Aarto self-service kiosks to be established

However, Outa won its initial case against Aarto in the Pretoria High Court in January 2022, and the plans were thrown into disarray.

Outa applied to the Constitutional Court for confirmation of the ruling, as is required by law, but the highest court in the land overturned the high court’s ruling in July 2023.

New plan for rollout by mid-2025 — but further delays expected

That same month, Mbalula’s successor — Sindisiwe Chkunga — announced a new plan that Aarto would be rolled out to 69 municipalities by the end of that year.

The rest of the municipalities were supposed to be done by 1 July 2024, with the points demerit system kicking in by September 2024 at the latest.

However, President Ramaphosa has yet to proclaim a new date for when the Aarto Amendment Act will take effect.

According to the National Automobile Dealers Association (Nada) chair Brandon Cohen, the implementation of Aarto and the Aarto Amendment Act has been pushed back to mid-2025.

The government only expects to complete Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the rollout by December 2024, while the points demerit system should take effect between April and mid-2025.

However, Nada and Outa believe that the rollout will again be delayed.

The transport department has yet to appoint members to the Appeals Tribunal, which was supposed to be fully functional in the second phase of the rollout.

Outa maintains although the Act was declared constitutional and lawful, it was impractical because it did not address the root causes of accidents, the risk of corruption, and the administrative burden it would place on motorists.

Outa argues it will be challenging to onboard all 245 of the country’s municipalities and seven major metros, as some are concerned about the RTIA’s 50% slice of traffic fine revenues.

Among those taking issue is the City of Cape Town, which has warned the implementation would be a mess.